The first step in reducing your junk mail is to find out where it’s coming from.  The direct mail mailers who deliver the junk mail to you may not necessarily be the primary suspect here.  Where they obtain and buy your address information is probably much more important.  By knowing who is actually selling your information, you have a much higher control in reducing your junk mail.

Stopping the Direct Mail Marketers

People often think about calling the direct mail mailers to request that they stop sending you junk mail.  The steps for normal users like us involves the following:

  1. Research and find out who is sending the junk mail to you.  It’s not always obvious who is the direct mail marketing firm that is responsible for handling direct mail advertising.  It may take some time for you to find the contact information.
  2. Call the firm and request to have them stop sending you junk mail.
  3. Take a break and repeat this procedure again for each company that you find.

Most of these companies will honor your request for about 5 years.  FCC states that after five years, these mailers may put you back onto the list and start sending you junk mail again.  Imagine the hassle of doing all this and having to repeat every five years.  Not exactly a productive use of your time.

Who’s Selling You Out?

Trying to stop junk mail after you are on their list is quite a hassle and sometimes difficult.  A better way is to understand exactly where they are getting your contact information and try to prevent the selling of your contact information.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you bought some products from an online e-commerce store.  You enter your billing and shipping information.  Wanting to make some side income, the store decides to secretly violate their privacy policy and sell your contact information off to direct mail marketers.  One day when you start getting some junk mail, you are very upset and you’re wondering who sold you out.  How do you find out and how can you prove that it’s done by this store?

Tagging Your Address

There is one sneaky but effective way that you can keep track.  It works similar to how postal mailboxes work.  You simply tack on a “mailbox number” to the end of your address.  For example, your current postal address is:

John Doe
1234 Maple Ave.
San Francisco, CA 90000

Now, what you do is tag a mailbox number to the end of your home address, like this:

John Doe
1234 Maple Ave. #100
San Francisco, CA 90000

Assign an arbitrary number per store where you have to enter your address.  For example, Amazon.com would get #100, Barnes & Noble would be #101, etc.  If you live in an apartment, it’s possible that you use tack on mailbox numbers to your apartment number, ie. “203-100″ or “A-203″.  The postman is usually able to know what’s going on and will still deliver mail to you properly.  Above all, make sure to keep a running tab of these numbers either on paper or in a spreadsheet.

Now, here’s the great part.  Someday, when you ever receive junk mail that gets sent to one of these “mailbox numbers”, you now know who exactly betrayed your trust.  You may even use the data as proof of evidence and be able to get recourse on the store that violated their privacy policy and betrayed your trust.

Alternative Options

Keeping track may only help you to identify the main culprit causing you grief, but it does not necessarily truly prevent junk mail from stopping.  You may still have to call the marketing firms individually to request that they stop.

Having said that, online postalmail mailboxes, postal mailboxes (PO Boxes), and mail forwarding services are all extremely viable alternatives that will save you time and hassle.  Of course, there is a monthly cost to these services whereas keeping track of your own mailbox numbers is free.

Fight Back

The important takeaway here is that by knowing who is selling you out, you have more options as to what you can do to stop junk mail.  And if you get frustrated enough, you can even fight back and get some money for troubles these people have caused you.